As computer technology has advanced to enable people to store more types and larger quantities of data on computer systems, there has been a growing need to enable people to find particular pieces of data that they had previously stored. For example, people frequently need to find old e-mails in their e-mail systems. Typically, people will perform a sort on values, such as the sender's name or something that would be in the e-mail's subject line. Examples of data that people store and want to find include documents, e-mails, and calendars, among other things.
Collaboration types of software have also become available that enable people to organize many types of data, for example, as a part of accomplishing some type of project. For example, collaboration software can be used to list the people working on a project as well as organizing documents, e-mails, a calendar of tasks completed and tasks that need to be completed for the project.
At various times, the people working on the project as well as their managers may want to find pertinent data. In order to find a desired document, for example, people typically perform a sort operation or a filter operation on documents that are associated with a project in the collaboration software.
However, as will become more evident, conventional sort and filter operations tend to be slow which discourages people from using them. For example, typically it takes approximately 30 seconds for a large amount of data to be filtered or sorted.